DREAM CAREER FINDER

HOW TO FIND OUT WHAT JOB
YOU ARE BEST AT

What Are Your Hidden Skills?

At the age of twenty-two, I stumbled upon a sport that I became quite good at.

I managed to finish in the top fifteen place getters in three world championship rounds.
The sport was racing rally cars.

To be quite frank it didn't make sense that I was good at it because rallying
involved fine skills and
fast reaction times that I had never exhibited in anything else I had ever done.

"I remember once when I took a girl friend for a ride in my rally car.
As the car rolled to a halt at the end of the run, she said to me:
'I didn't think you had it in you'"

This girl knew me in lots of other settings but she couldn't imagine that I would be good
at anything like that.

That was hardly surprising because I was a bit surprised myself.

These supposedly new found skills and abilities were at great odds
with the abilities
I had demonstrated in my previous twenty years of life.

The reason I give this example is to illustrate how difficult it can be to
identify our own inborn skills and the subsequent difficulty involved in how to choose a career.

Do Your Inborn Abilities Ever Change?

Maybe my inborn skills and abilities had changed. Perhaps I had become more skilled
at things that I previously was lacking in.

I had to conclude that this wasn't the case.
I was still no good at all those things.
[This is where an assessment like the Dream Career Finder would have
helped me]

Then I began to hear of other stories where people had suddenly discovered skills,
abilities and talents that for the most part of their life appeared totally absent.

Arthur Miller, in his excellent book The Power of Uniqueness recounts an example of this.
During WW2, a fellow navy officer's lack of decisive action almost caused a disaster on
their ship.

One night when he was in charge of the ship, he realized he was fast on a collision
course with another ship that had its lights turned off (as was common during war time).

The officer froze in action as he was unable to make the necessary decisions to
avoid a tragedy.

The skipper was immediately called to the tower and managed to avert a
collision
in the nick of time, much to the shame of the officer involved.

So it was with great astonishment several months later when that same officer
found himself in another crisis situation that required a fast and
competent response, that his reaction was dramatically different.

A fire had now broken out in the ship near some explosives after they had
taken a hit from shelling.

While most men on board were scrambling to save their own souls, this same
officer rallied a group of men and remarkably led them into the danger zone
to put the fire out.

Your Dream Career Finder Revealed

On the surface, there appeared to be an extraordinary paradox to these two
vastly different responses by the officer.

It looked like two very similar situations.
But as Miller points out, the small subtleties of human uniqueness meant that
the officer could respond quite differently in those two situations and when his
natural aptitudes or inborn job skills were factored in, it all made sense.
The Dream Career Finder assessment is helpful in identifying
these subtleties.

In the case of the fire, he saw that the threat was limited to just a handful of
men and the decision didn't involve assessing radar data and complex decision
making under an emergency situation, areas he discovered he was not gifted in.

But that job skills list was not required in the fire emergency.
Skills of quick thinking under a different set of circumstances were needed, and in this case he responded
admirably.
And he was able to respond instinctively.

Small Changes In Our Roles Can Produce Big Changes In Our Career Success

I believe that we are so uniquely and intricately wired as human beings that
although we may not be good at a whole group of related tasks, a slight change
in the application or a slight change in our motivation for doing something, can have a seismic shift in the way our abilities show themselves.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I don't do practical things particularly fast.
When I was a teenager, I was so much slower than everyone else that when I
went potato picking, I was nick named "murtle the turtle".

And that pretty much sums up the speed at which I did most practical things.
However, I began to notice that if you threw me into an emergency situation,
the speed at which I responded was alarmingly fast in contrast to my normal responses.

Now we know that everyone has their adrenalin pumping in an emergency
and their speed of responding is usually much faster.

But I noticed that mine went beyond that.

I was invariably the one who was leading the charge and would become
frustrated at the speed at which other people could respond to the same
emergency situation.

Interestingly, I frequently found myself in situations of an emergency nature.

My wife would sometimes ask me when I got home at night "What emergency
did you get involved in today".

I would often find myself coming across a situation that involved me having to
call emergency services and help until they arrived.

As I thought about this I began to realize that I had an immense desire to see
people in difficulty helped and emergency situations brought under control as quickly as possible.

Whether it was a crime scene, accident scene or natural disasters, my
motivation was the same.

Life is a hypocrite if I can't live the way it moves me

When I traveled to Samoa in 2009 to help with the tsunami disaster relief, I became
frustrated with the lack of urgency and planning that involved just about every aspect of the response.

In 99% of my daily living I was not fast at getting practical things done, but tweak
the reason for doing something, and the difference in speed and effectiveness
became extraordinary. This was the type of thing that I uncovered when I first
completed the Dream Career Finder inborn job skills assessment.

Some Gifts Are Easily Identified From An Early Age

Of course in other situations it is unmistakable to all, that a particular person
has immense talent identifiable when they are very young.

When Peter Jackson was only eight years old, a friend of his parents
could see his passion for taking photos, so she gave him a movie camera to
play with.
He immediately started recording his own movies with his friends. The rest
as they say is history.

Sir Peter Jackson is now a multiple academy award winner with movies like
The Lord of the Rings, King Kong and District 9 to his credit.

Recently I watched a similar scenario unfolding on a documentary on TV
about a twelve year old boy who had a passion for making movies.
He had become so good at it that he was now starting to get noticed and
contacted by film industry professionals.

The parents of this boy made a
not too surprising comment when they said

He works very hard at making these movies, working long hours but
we never have to tell him to do it or motivate him in any way.

This is usually a reliable way of identifying a young person's inborn abilities;
they have abundant inbuilt motivation and don't require any external
prodding from parents or others.

My belief is that, not only are we all born with these natural gifts and abilities
but they are frequently quite difficult to identify in ourselves.

Can You See Your Own Inborn Job Skills, Abilities and Talents

It sometimes seems easier to see them in other people.
If you have children you can often see these abilities in them from a very early age.
You can also often identify them in other people that you know well.

One of my children has a particularly gentle and compassionate nature
that was identifiable from birth.

As he grew up he showed a naturally kind heart towards his siblings and
people in general.
We could see that he could greatly empathize with other people's pain.

This was something that was not a result of his environment or parental upbringing
(my wife will readily attest to my lack of compassion), and none of his other six
siblings subsequently showed this attribute so strongly.

His compassion towards others was obvious to me and as someone who had spent many years providing career change advice, I was interested how that gifting might be put to use later in life.

When our next child was born I was quite surprised to see quite a different
situation at hand.

I distinctly remember the events in the birthing room.
He came out of the womb wiggling and fighting like a hooked fish.
When I put my finger out for him to hold he grabbed it with the intensity of a
drowning child.

Workers Dissatisfied - survey
January 2010

Workers are becoming more unhappy with their jobs, according
to a new survey that found 55 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with their work.
Linda Barrington, managing director of human capital at the Conference
Board, says that workers who find their jobs interesting are more likely to be innovative.

Workers have grown steadily more unhappy for the following reasons:

1. Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.

2. Incomes have not kept up with inflation.

And from that moment on he displayed skills, abilities and personality traits
that were vastly different from his brother.

The attributes that were so apparent in his brother were nowhere to be seen
in him.

But as is the case with everyone, he had his own set of skills and abilities.
One of those was in the area of manual tasks.
He was innately attracted to building, creating and fixing things from a very early
age and his work ethic, speed and thoroughness at doing those types of activities
was quite noticeable.

He also began to develop a very mature approach to handling money and before
long was earning and saving significant amounts of money.

Once at the age of about nine or ten he had the opportunity to help out a builder
who was renovating a shop of ours.

The builder later commented to me how he found him to be such a good
worker and how capable he was for his age.
He asked if he could have him back the next day to help.

Everyone is Born With Them

I could go through my other children and tell you how one of them has shown
a fascination with airplanes for as long as we can remember and at the age of
nine had begun clocking up hours towards his private pilot's license.

There is no doubt in his mind, or mine, that he will be flying commercial aircraft
in the not too distant future.

I give these examples not because my children are different from anyone else's.

On the contrary it is my firm belief that every person on the planet is born with
certain bents that they are naturally predisposed to use but for many reasons
we are often unaware of them or perhaps they have been swept under the carpet.

How To Find Out Your Abilities,
Skills And Natural Motivations?

Inborn job skills or motivated abilities are recurring skills that are identifiable
from an early age.

Motivated Abilities was a term coined by Arthur Miller, who noted that after
working with a large number of workers as a personnel manager, he realized that
people's abilities were consistently recurring throughout their life.

But most of the time people were unaware
of this happening.

He called them 'motivated abilities' because when we work with these abilities
we are intensely motivated in what we do.

These are also known as natural work abilities, inborn abilities or worker temperaments.